Health Crises and Technological Fixes: Sean Johnston Guest Blog

“… trust in technological fixes is a cultural perception having profound implications for human actions and power relations.” Sean Johnston, Techno-Fixers

In the 21st century, technology seems to provide solutions for almost any problem imaginable. From hi-tech medical equipment to an overabundance of varying phone apps, the implementation of technological fixes towards the issues we encounter is not only normal, but expected. For some, this faith in the remedial powers of technology has also been projected onto the current COVID-19 crisis and many hope for a swift technological fix, such as the manufacturing of a vaccine or cure.

However, as MQUP author Sean Johnston brings to light, this faith we place in technological developments and solutions is a relatively new and culturally created phenomenon, one that Johnston invites us to question. In this month’s guest blog post, we have asked Sean Johnston the following question:

“We have expanded the ‘presence’ of our digital selves into every area of life; how has this new normal intersected with the subject of your book?”

His enlightening response helps us understand our own relationship to technology and the limitations of the solutions it offers.

A critical examination of modern faith in technology, Sean Johnston’s new book Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith evaluates past mistakes, present implications, and future opportunities for innovating societies. Cautioning that the rhetoric of technological fixes seldom matches reality, Techno-Fixers examines how employing innovation to bypass traditional methods can foster as many problems as it solves.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an almost unprecedented event in modern memory. Technologically developed countries last faced such an acute assault on public health when influenza killed millions at the end of the First World War. What has surprised many today – notably some national leaders – is that there isn’t an immediate technological fix.

Confidence about tech-fixes to solve human problems swept to popularity through the twentieth century. Promoted initially in North America by fringe engineering groups such as Technocracy Inc, this technological hubris was later echoed by establishment scientists. Nuclear engineer and American National Lab Director Alvin Weinberg, for example, claimed that tech-fixing could bypass all the usual methods of solving social problems – from community cooperation, education, laws, and economic adjustment – in favour of quick inventive solutions.

But surely some technologies do help in times like these? Just as telephones, at least for those fortunate enough to have one, eased isolation during the Influenza pandemic a century ago and helped keep life and business moving, today’s access to social media mirrors that benefit for many, but arguably does not extend it. New technological solutions can also bring their own problems. It’s now widely appreciated how the instant availability of online information offers fresh opportunities for exploitation. Some marketers have run with the promise of timely technological fixes with their own viral messages. Newsfeeds and even Coronavirus statistics websites have cosied up to online ads for ultraviolet sanitizers, hat-visor-mask fashionware and click-bait for even more dubious miracle health solutions. Such advertising aims at our widespread faith in quick technological alternatives for complex human problems and simplistic expectation of unalloyed benefits.

The reality is that, when an effective technological approach does emerge, the brunt of the work will still hinge on marshalling social, economic and legal infrastructure. Boomers in many countries may remember the network of TB screening vans and public service advertising that blanketed neighbourhoods each summer through the 1950s and 60s. These were needed long after the development of effective antibiotic treatments following the Second World War, to identify infected individuals and direct them to the tightly woven social system of doctors’ clinics, hospitals, and follow-on medical care. The moral is that when technological fixes can be found, they work only alongside essential social tools, and seldom as well or as simply as we hope.

Operation Doorstep tuberculosis skin test and chest x-ray vehicle, 1971 (City of Vancouver Archives, Pacific National Exhibition Fonds).

Sean Johnston is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Glasgow. He has written nine books on the history and sociology of science and technology, including Holographic Visions: A History of New Science, The Neutron’s Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity, and A History of Light and Colour Measurement: Science in the Shadows.

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